Curbing Climate Change
Climate change is the most important environmental challenge of our time. The carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels for energy is thought to contribute to a global rise in temperature - global warming.
Global emissions of carbon dioxide are increasing rapidly and leading scientists believe that this will result in an increase in the average global ground-level temperature by up to 6 degrees by the year 2100. Such an increase in global temperature could lead to major physical, ecological, social and economical changes as a result of different climate effects such as rising sea level and an increasing frequency of extreme weather events, drought and flooding.
To avoid the potentially damaging effects of climate change we need to stop the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from rising indefinitely. The European Union believes that the global temperature rise should be limited to no more than 2 degrees C above the pre-industrial level in order to prevent the worst possible impact of climate change.
In 2002, the accumulated amount of carbon dioxide emissions in the world was 23 billion tonnes and every citizen in the western world contributes 6 to 8 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually.
The world community has worked intensively to resolve emission problems since the end of 1980s when the UN's climate panel, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), was founded. At the Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, participating countries agreed on a climate convention to stabilise the level of greenhouse gases. In 1997, the convention was supplemented with a conclusive treaty, the Kyoto Protocol. In the Kyoto Protocol, which came into force as late as 2005, the participating industrialised countries agreed to reduce greenhouse gases from the 1990 level by an average of 5 per cent by the years 2008 to 2012.
The protocol represents the first step in combating climate change. However, several countries remain outside the treaty, such as the United States, whose carbon dioxide emissions represent about one quarter of all global emissions.
At the same time, new projections from the IEA (International Energy Agency) show that the demand for energy will increase by almost 50 per cent leading up to 2030 - heightened by the demand of developing countries like China and India. The greater part of this energy increase is projected to be met by the use of fossil fuels. Within the European Union the demand for energy is projected to rise by 20 per cent during the same period.
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